Where the Haemanthus Grows
by SweeneyGirl310593
Summary: Mustang pays her respects and enjoys a moment of quiet. Missing scene from the end of Morning Star.


Authors note: a quick, perhaps sentimental missing scene by this reletively recent Howler recruit set between the final chapter and epilouge of Morning Star. Let me know what you all think.

The Red town of Lykos, birthplace of the Reaper of Mars is quite an incredible sight. Last time I was here I didn't appreciate the sheer scale of it. Rows and rows of grimy, cramped living accommodations and the quasi businesses that served them, ascending as far as the eye can see, into every crevice of this vast, ruddy cavern. A hive where the queen lived impossibly remote from the workers who toiled here, godlike, deigning to appear before them occasionally, to peer in at them to condescend to those she thought vastly beneath her through the only window they had to the outside world. A window that was murky with the lies that poured through it, the antithesis of sunlight. It is only fitting that that window, suspended far above me, equidistant from everybody who once lived here, is as smashed as the illusion it maintained. A crack bisects its now dark surface leaving only the strip lighting that glows dimly above to bathe the place in a weird facsimile of twilight. I try to imagine it in its usual state, when it is teaming with life and concentrated humanity and somehow I can't. Perhaps because it seems permanently changed. After the revelations and turmoil its people have experienced these past few years, it seems impossible for it to pick up where it left off even if they do return here.

I'm not sure why I have come. Perhaps I seek the peace and quiet of such an empty place. Since I assumed the office of Sovereign I have not been alone with my thoughts for a second and I am unlikely to be so once we return to Luna. I can walk these narrow streets where I imagine small children playing and upon the floor of the cavern where thousands of Red's gathered for their Laureltide without bodyguards. I can forget the weight of responsibility that has settled on me. Perhaps I knew it would fall to me. Perhaps I expected it to be Darrow as had always seemed Aries's design.

Then I catch a sight that arrests my attention. A ramshackle scaffold, it's wood stained with the unwashed blood of Reds who had dared to defy their masters. I stare at the frayed, filthy rope that sways in the gentle, stale breeze coming from the tunnels. On Mars, the gravity is low. You have to pull your loved one's legs to end it quickly, Darrow told me. I wonder with a slightly sick feeling whether his father and his wife had met their woeful ends on this sorry little construction. Whether this had been the stage upon which Persephone's song rang out to be disseminated across the worlds. A tiny, beaten girl who had seized upon the only power she had. Strange to think that such a brittle songbird could have had this much impact upon my life and the lives of all I've known. How much longer would it have taken for Red to rise without her? I feel I should say something. The silence I came here to seek is now intolerable.

"Hello." My usually strong voice is a horse, thin shadow of it's usual self as it echoes back to me from the walls. I clear my throat to strengthen it. Facing the scaffold I tell her what I would want her to hear "You don't know me but I have the privilege to call your husband a comrade and to love him. You are in his heart still." I take a breath "I want you know know that I heard your song as so many others did. People across the worlds sing it now. We added voices and meaning, hopes and hurts of our own and now we have taken Luna with it. Eo, you could have had no idea what it meant but I want to thank you. For Darrow. For your dream. It has the chance to make us better. I always saw the wrong of things but I accepted it. Now I have the chance to make right of them."

An amplified intake of breath sends me whirling about. I almost draw my razor before I see who it is. Golden eyes he wasn't born with but that become him shining, a strange sad expression on his face. "Thankyou Mustang. That was beautiful." Darrow tells me.

"What are you doing here?" I demand, unused to being so startled.

"I don't know." He frowns and I guess he is probably here for the same reason I am. To be away from the oppressive weight of company. Still finding each other down here isn't exactly unpleasant. Darrow looks past me at the scaffold. "She would have loved you" he says softly. He has told me so before.

I follow his gaze, feeling the weight of it settle on me. Just one symbol, one example of the horrors my Colour are responsible for. "I doubt there was anyone that died on that thing that deserved it" I say.

Darrow snorts "not all us Reds are angels with dirty faces and clipped wings, Mustang. But yes, there should have been a hell of a lot less."

We fall silent for a while. Lost in our own thoughts. "It occurs to me that the last time we were here together I was on my knees with your gun to my head." Darrow says.

Annoyance at him for bringing it up flares in me momentarily "if I was ever going to kill you I would have done it."

"I don't doubt you. That's why I showed you what I really was. Once I knew I could. Before everything fell apart and I had to be put together again. Before I knew I had already lost your trust."

I move closer to him, the corner of my mouth upturned. "How times have changed."

"Yes. It's now apparently a privilege to know me." Darrow says, a teasing look in his eye.

"Don't mock me, Reaper." I tell him with a glare that has no real heat behind it.

"I wouldn't dare!" He grins. It fades into a contemplative stare at the ground. "Would you...would you like to see where she really is?" He asks.

I take his arm with a nod.

/

As we walk the tunnels around Lykos, past the Webbery where most of its women worked, Darrow tells me of his childhood home, shows me the life that came before. This is how it should have been last time.

"Here it is" Darrow says eventually "the place I first saw the sun."

I stare at the garden. It looks poorer than the most neglected minor courtyard in a low Gold's house. Especially as it has clearly been treated with irreverence. Refuse that may or may not have been there before Eo's hanging mars the greenery. Even so I try to imagine it through his Red eyes. Eyes that had rarely seen even these colours before let alone a whole space filled with grass and a scattering of trees. Underneath the largest, a simple stone marks the place Darrow's wife is buried. Haemanthus blossoms entwine over the grave.

We two stand there for a moment, the atmosphere feeling heavy despite our planet's low gravity. Darrow watches my face for a reaction, wondering what I must make of it.

"It's so peaceful here. I feel like we are the only people in the worlds." I wonder with a pang of awkwardness whether the sixteen year old Darrow and Eo had felt or even said the same thing. Am I an intruder here? Darrow said she would have loved me. To her, my Colour was the head that moved the boot of the Grays who so oppressed her people. More than that I was the daughter of the man who appeared only to pass cruel judgement. Could she have looked past it and comprehended that not every Gold need be her enemy?

Darrow stands beside me at the simple grave, seeming in a similarly contemplative mood. Suddenly he turns to me."I've just had a thought while we are here. The Sons were frantic when they evacuated Lykos" Darrow says "there wasn't time for my people to gather treasures beyond each other. They could take only provisions. There's a few things my mother left behind that I feel she misses." He sighs, then fixes his eyes on me "will you be ok here?"

I almost snort at the thought of a Peerless Scarred being afraid in this poor slave's paradise. I manage to turn it into a wry upturn of my lips. After all this place is heavy with significance for Darrow. This is the place from which he rose. I will not disrespect it by scoffing at it's import.

"I'm prime." I tell him. He nods and turns back down the tunnel, lights from above dappling across his broad shoulders before he disappears from view. I know this has nothing to do with any trinkets his mother may have left behind. Deanna's sentimentality would not reach that far. The things of true value to her all made it out of Lykos. This is his way of asking to be alone and I won't deny him.

Darrow has always had a complicated relationship with truth. For nearly five years, he was forced to lie and conceal his true nature, like a haemanthus blossom grasped in a furtive grip. Once it hurt me, to know that I had almost given him my heart completely, but it seemed I had never known his. I had opened myself to a complete stranger and was carrying his child. Now I understand how much of his self I had known even then and am humbled by the lonely burden he hid even from those closest. A lone wolf among cunning lions, silently howling for those he had lost, in an agony of isolation.

Despite the mission of his earlier days, he naturally wears and bleeds his heart plainly, even as he sneaks away to feel his pain and tend his wounds in private now. Perhaps that essential sincerity is why he always insisted on keeping part of his deeply provincial name instead of taking a more completely Aureate identity. 'The perfume wouldn't change, but a rose shouldn't go by any other name' I think and shudder, having made myself the spectre of Roque for a moment. It also occurs to me that the one secret left between us is carried on my side now. I'll have to remedy that soon.

"Was he this way to you?" I turn to the mound of green grass and blossoms that looks so anaemic to eyes that looked across rolling meadows as she galloped through them as a child but was once the forbidden miracle that two married children once died for a moment in. Now the garden is littered with trash, the Grays that once enforced the Society's grip on this place having apparently used it as a rubbish dump. A flare of sympathetic anger blooms in my chest. This is no way to treat the birthplace of the greatest Rising humankind has ever known. A place still beautiful even for its smallness and the careless desecration it has suffered. I pick up a spent can of soup, serrated, corroded, it's sides coated with the residue of an unremarkable, quick meal that was probably forgotten within hours of sliding down the gullet of a Gray on duty. Perhaps it was even the same Gray who lashed the one I love and his wife, an uncaring hand of Octavia au Lune. It shouldn't be here. I hurl the can just as unceremoniously into the dark tunnel and get to work.

/

As I return to the garden, I am almost running. I detest Lykos in it's current state. A honeycomb city shrouded in a kind of silence that never fell before. Home is the people there. The comings and goings, ebb and flow of everyday lives. People will return here. The mines of Mars are hard places to call home but, for some at least, diving through Hell is all they have ever known and all they care to. The world's hunger for Helium will not simply abate because the Rising has prevailed. the wheel must keep turning but now at least, I can hope it will no longer crush my people beneath it's weight. At this moment, my Lykos is just a husk. At least the garden where Eo lays is meant to be quiet.

As I return to Mustang I can see she has not been idle and my heart feels as though it were caught in a vice as I see what she's done. Hair in her swept back braid shining every shade of Gold conceivable in the shaft of light above, her arms are laden with the marks of disrespect and contempt of my people that I once believed characterised a Gray. She nimbly descends the small green mound and lays her load in the shadows. The last of the filth cleared away. This is a sight that would have seemed impossible to me or anyone else the last night I spent with Eo. A godlike, Goldborn creature like her descending into the tunnels just above hell, sullying her arms with waste to show reverence to a undernourished, fragile slave girl with the fire of a fierce and terrible hope in her heart and a song that burned across the worlds. The girl her father killed. Mustang looks at me almost shyly, like a girl caught in a act of subterfuge for which she wants approval. The strangeness of such a look on that confident face both shocks and amuses me. I can only imagine what fun Sevro could make. I smile through tears of joy that have gathered in my eyes.

"Thankyou Mustang. For this and so much more."

She laughs "not as long as your usual speeches my love but still, well met. You're most welcome."

"I mean it, Virginia" the use of her given name checks her gentle mirth as I close the space between us, taking her hands in mine "with all my heart." She wraps her strong arms around my chest and I feel her face move back into a smile against my body. I don't know how long we hold each other there. Long enough that the light from above moves across the space. She is the first to stir in the embrace, looking up into my face with a gently quizzical look "You prime?"

I nod, leading Mustang from the place the ghosts of my past reside. The future we face is uncertain. Rome was not built in a day and neither will our better Society be. I take comfort in the fact that Mustang and I have what we need to move forward. We have a band of brothers and sisters, our family both chosen and blood. Howling madmen, disgruntled slaves, misfits, savages, sympathetic collaborators. I love them. Bloodydamn heroes all.

I glance back at Eo's grave. Her impossible hope has come to fruition and still we shall reach higher. I wonder briefly whether we dare wish for more than this victory but then I feel Mustang's hand in mine and ask myself why not?

Why the hell not?


End file.
